Soviet constitutions

Why four constitutions?

A Soviet constitution was not only a rulebook for the machinery of government. Where a capitalist constitution mostly sets out how organs of power are composed and what the state may not do to a person, a Soviet constitution also fixed the social and economic order, and announced in its preamble how far society had come.

New constitutions therefore appeared not when the rules of government needed adjusting but when the leadership judged that society had reached a new stage. Soviet legal theory treated a constitution as both a record of what had been achieved and a programme for what was still to come, and that doubling is the place to start when reading one.

1. 1918: power belongs to the soviets

Adopted by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets the year after the October Revolution, this was the first constitution of the Russian Soviet Republic. There was as yet no USSR: the Union was formed in 1922, so this text governed the Russian republic alone.

It opens with the whole of the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People. Measures the revolution had already taken, the abolition of private property in land, the transfer of banks and factories, universal labour duty, became constitutional articles.

What separates it most sharply from its successors is the franchise, which was not equal. Delegates to the All-Russian Congress were returned by city soviets at one per 25,000 voters and by rural provincial congresses at one per 125,000 inhabitants (Article 25): a worker's vote weighed more than a peasant's. People who hired others for profit, lived on unearned income, traded privately, served as clergy, or had belonged to the old police, the gendarmerie or the Romanov house had no vote at all (Article 65).

The reasoning of the time ran as follows. This was a transitional period in which the class struggle was not over, and the constitution set down the dictatorship of the workers and poor peasants for that period (Article 9), so there was no reason to restore political rights to the exploiting classes just overthrown. Article 23 went further and withdrew rights from individuals and groups who used them to the detriment of the revolution.

2. 1924: the constitution that made a union

The 1924 constitution translated the 1922 treaty of union into constitutional form. It contains almost no articles on citizens' rights. What it settles is the division of competence between the Union and the republics and the standing of the republics, including the right to secede; rights were left to the constitutions of the individual republics. In the history of Soviet constitutions this one reads as the document that created a federal form rather than one that proclaimed a new society. The reference library does not yet hold a translation of it.

3. 1936: a wider franchise, and the party enters the text

Known as the Stalin Constitution. Two things changed substantially.

The first was the franchise. Weighted voting and disenfranchisement disappeared, replaced by universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage. The Congress of Soviets gave way to a bicameral Supreme Soviet of the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of Nationalities. The internal logic follows from the previous section: once the exploiting classes were declared to have ceased to exist, the restrictions aimed at them had lost their ground.

The second was the codification of social rights. The rights to work, to rest, to education and to maintenance in old age and sickness became articles, each stated together with the means by which it was guaranteed (Articles 118 to 121). This way of writing, a right and its material guarantee side by side, was followed by socialist constitutions elsewhere.

Article 126 brought the Communist Party into a Soviet constitution for the first time, as the "leading core" of the working people's organisations.

The argument about this constitution turns on the gap between text and practice. The Great Terror reached its height the year after adoption, and the inviolability of the person (Article 127) and open trials counted for nothing before the summary work of the special troikas. This is where the Western scholarly treatment of the document as a sham constitution begins. Against it stands the argument that much of the text, free education and health care, equal rights for women, was in fact carried out, and that the constitution accurately records how Soviet society understood itself. The two verdicts are looking at different faces of the same document.

4. 1977: developed socialism and Article 6

Adopted under Brezhnev, in force until the Union dissolved. The preamble declares that a developed socialist society has been built in the USSR and defines the state, having completed the tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a state of all the people. The redefinition, from a state exercising the dictatorship of a class to a state of the whole people, was contested from the outset: the Chinese and Albanian parties read it as evidence of revisionism, while the orthodox Soviet answer was that in a society without antagonistic classes a change in the class character of the state follows from Marxist theory of the state.

The most quoted provision is Article 6, which made the CPSU "the leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organisations and public organisations." Where the 1936 text had named the party the leading core of a set of associations, this one placed it above the organs of state.

The amendments of 1988 to 1990 reversed that structure. A Congress of People's Deputies was created and a presidency introduced, and in March 1990 Article 6 was amended, ending the party's monopoly position.

Did the text count for nothing?

Soviet constitutions are often dismissed as paper. It is true that the text failed to bind political reality in many episodes. Yet there are places where it took effect late. Article 72 of the 1977 Constitution reserved to every union republic "the right freely to secede from the USSR." When the Baltic republics, Georgia and others declared independence in 1990 and 1991, that article was the ground they cited. A clause included to complete the federal form became the opening step in the procedure that undid the federation.